If Not Silver, What? eBook

OBJECTIONS TO SILVER, AND COMMENTS THEREON.

=Silver is too bulky for use in large sums.=

That objection is obsolete. We do not now carry
coin; we carry its paper representatives, those issued
by government being absolutely secured. This
combines all the advantage of coin, bank paper, and
the proposed fiat money. A silver certificate
for $500 weighs less than a gold dollar. In that
denomination the Jay Gould estate could be carried
by one man.

=But silver certificates would not remain at par.=

At par with what? Everything in the universe
is at par with itself. The volume of certificates
issued by the government would be exactly the amount
of the metal deposited, and that amount could never
be suddenly increased or diminished, for the product
of the mines in any one year is very seldom more than
three per cent. of the stock already on hand, and
half of that is used in the arts. It is self-evident,
therefore, that such certificates would be many times
more stable in value than any form of bank paper yet
devised.

=Gold would go out of circulation.=

It has already gone out. Under the present policy
of the government we have all the disadvantages of
both systems and the advantages of neither, with the
added element of chronic uncertainty and an artificial
scare gotten up for political purposes.

=And that very scare shows an important fact which
you silverites ought to heed—­that nearly
all the bankers and heavy moneyed men are opposed to
free coinage.=

Nearly all the slaveholders were opposed to emancipation.
All the landlords in Great Britain were opposed to
the abolition of the Corn Laws, and all the silversmiths
of Ephesus were violently opposed to the “agitation”
started by St. Paul. And what of it? The
silversmiths were honest enough to admit the cause
of their opposition (Acts xix. 24, 28), but these
fellows are not. The Ephesians got up a riot;
these fellows get up panics. “Have ye not
read that when the devil goeth out of a man then it
teareth him?”

=But are not bankers and other men who handle money
as a business better qualified than other people to
judge of the proper metal?=

Certainly not. On the contrary, they are for
many reasons much less competent, as experience has
repeatedly shown. All students of social science
know, indeed all close observers know, that those who
do the routine work in any vocation seldom form comprehensive
views of it, and those who manage the details of a
business are very rarely indeed able to master the
higher philosophy thereof. This is a general truth
applicable to all vocations except those, like law,
in which a mastery of the science is a necessity for
conducting the details. Experts in details often
make the worst blunders in general management.
Nearly all the inventions of perpetual motion come
from practical mechanics. Nearly all the crazy
designs in motors come from engineers. The educational
schemes of truly colossal absurdity come mostly from
teachers; all the quack nostrums and elixirs to “restore
lost manhood” are invented by doctors, and nearly
all the crazy religions are started by preachers.